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Interface Design
Help!
The fine art of documentation
Issue: 2.4 (March/April 2004)
Author: Toby Rush
Author Bio: Toby Rush is a music instructor, consultant, freelance programmer, web designer, husband, and dad in Greeley, Colorado.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 9,651
Starting Page Number: 44
RBD Number: 2422
Resource File(s): None
Related Link(s): None
Known Limitations: None
Excerpt of article text...
If you're a programmer for some megacorporation, chances are you don't have to worry much about writing User Manuals for your software; that's the job of the technical writers. The rest of us know that writing the documentation is one of the approximately 20,000 steps between finishing the programming and releasing the software to the masses.
But it's an important step... one that can make the difference between a successful program or a flop. Over the next few articles, we'll discuss various aspects of providing help for users of your software: building a user-friendly interface, designing contextual help, and writing the user manual.
The Helpful Interface
The foundation for a well-designed help system is a well-designed user interface. Theoretically, a perfectly designed interface wouldn't even need an accompanying user manual, and some small programs come close to this level of user-friendliness (Apple's Calculator, for example). In practice, of course, even the best programs still require some sort of user manual, but a well-designed interface can drastically reduce the user's reliance on any included documentation.
...End of Excerpt. Please purchase the magazine to read the full article.
Article copyrighted by REALbasic Developer magazine. All rights reserved.
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